Bush and company have hijacked the meaning of the word “democracy.” They employ it as though they were using it in reference to a liberal democracy when in fact they are using it in reference to a majoritarian rule system. They love having it both ways, too: falsely claiming for themselves the moral goodness of providing for liberty, and simultaneously using majoritarian rule to deprive minorities of their rights, even though were those minorities to exercise their rights, they would harm nobody in doing so.

Thomas Jefferson once noted: “A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine.”

Since Jefferson said that, people have done some serious thinking about correctives to exactly that potential drawback to a “democratic” system. The idea evolved that it is possible to distinguish between what political theorists call a “liberal democracy” and an “illiberal democracy.”

Liberal democracies provide in their constitutions for the protection of minority rights. They also feature truly representational government, rather than majoritarian rule.

This concept of the liberal democracy is reaching its finest flowering in many countries of the European Union, and is the true standard for democracy per se. Working steadily against that model, however, reactionary forces in the United States have eroded rather than enhanced the country’s democracy.

For one of many, many examples of that, we can look at Bush and company’s attitude towards civil rights for homosexual persons. That majority of the population of the United States which considers that homosexuals should not be accorded civil rights acts most vigorously to deny homosexuals their rights. Then that majority pats itself on the back in smug self-satisfaction, congratulating itself for putting democracy into action.

But people everywhere who are bien-pensants recognize that a system based on majoritarian rule is not a liberal democracy, and has no justifiable claims to being a beacon of liberty, for as much as it may insist that it is a beacon of liberty.

The recent voting in Iraq formalized, among other things, a constitution authorizing people to enforce Sharia law. In essence, Sharia gives men legal authority to deny women their rights. There is a lot more than that wrong with Sharia, but this one defect is so overwhelmingly enormous that whatever political system permits its application can not possibly be a liberal democracy.

My point here is that when Bush uses the word “democracy,” what everybody should be careful to understand is that he tends to mean “majoritarian rule.” Majoritarian rule is not preferable to a liberal democracy. And Bush counts on majoritarian rule as a fair-weather friend. When in 2000 Al Gore received more of the popular vote country-wide than he, Bush did not protest the anti-democratic nature of the Supreme Court’s decision to stop the Florida recount, giving him the Electoral College votes he needed to seize power.